The invention relates to a cigarette pack, especially a hinge-lid pack, in which a cigarette group is wrapped in an inner blank, with a flap separable from the inner blank by pulling off as a result of punchings (perforations), the flap adjoining a lift-out strip which extends in a front wall of the inner blank at least into the region of a bottom wall of the latter.
The invention is mainly concerned with (cigarette) packs designed as hinge-lid packs. This type of pack in very widespread use throughout the world is constructed by attaching to a pack part a hinge-lid which is connected to a rear wall of the pack part by means of a hinge connection. In such hinge-lid packs, the pack part conventionally has attached to it a collar which extends in the region of the front wall and side walls of the pack part and which projects partially from this.
The pack content, in particular a cigarette group, is conventionally wrapped in an inner blank made of tinfoil. This inner blank is folded round the pack content (cigarette group) in such a way that folding tabs of the inner blank which partially overlap one another are formed in the region of the vertical narrow side face and in the region of an upper end face.
The customary construction of a hinge-lid pack or of an inner blank of the latter includes a pull-off flap marked by punchings or perforations. When the cigarette pack is to be used, this flap is pulled off in such a way as to expose a region of the pack content which faces the front wall of the pack. The pull-off flap includes an upper region of the front wall projecting from the pack part and the adjacent parts of the side wall. Furthermore, a front part of the end wall of the inner blank is removed together with the flap.
In a type of pack of this kind, it is already known to attach a lift-out strip as part of the inner wrapping (German Offenlegungsschrift No. 3,410,217). The function of the lift-out strip is to lift part of the pack content, particularly some cigarettes especially at the front, by pulling, so as to make it easier to extract them from the pack. In the known pack, the lift-out strip is marked by punchings (severing cuts with residual connections) in the region of a front wall, a bottom wall and part of a rear wall of the inner blank. An upper end of the lift-out strip is connected to the pull-off flap. When the flap is pulled off, therefore, the lift-out strip is actuated at the same time and is finally torn off and pulled out of the pack.
In this known version of a cigarette pack, the lift-out strip integrated in the inner blank can be actuated only once, in particular when the flap is being pulled off. After that, that is to say during the extraction of further cigarettes, the lift-out strip can no longer be activated because it has been pulled out of the pack.